January 17, 2015
A READER writes:
Regarding your excellent entries on the decline of libraries, here is confirmation: an article describing (celebrating, really) their new function as “vibrant and attractive community hubs,” the phrase quoted from U.K. research.
The photograph alone says everything.
For the record, I did not know Good magazine, but felt immediately comfortable (cough, cough) when I saw that it is “a magazine for the Global citizen.”
January 16, 2015
I SAID in a previous post that “Pope” Francis had become a Buddhist. I’m afraid this report is already quite dated. Jorge Bergoglio has converted to Islam. Dear friends, I am sure of it, judging from his words on the Charlie Hebdo attacks. When asked yesterday about the attacks, the pseudo-pope implied, in so many words, that it is reasonable for a Muslim to kill someone who offends his “religion.” Only a believing Muslim would say this kind of thing.
During the press conference, Pope Francis was asked by a French journalist about the relationship between freedom of religion and freedom of expression. He replied saying that both are “fundamental human rights” and stressed that killing in the name of God “is an aberration.” But he said there were limits to that freedom of expression. By way of example he referred to Alberto Gasparri who organizes the papal trips and was standing by his side on the plane. The Pope said if “his good friend Dr Gasparri” says a curse word against his mother, he can “expect a punch”, and at that point he gestured with a pretend punch towards him, saying: “It’s normal. You cannot provoke. You cannot insult the faith of others. You cannot make fun of the faith of others.”
Jorge Bergoglio is a one-man argument for strict limits on freedom of expression.
Stay tuned. We don’t know what religion the Argentine Bomber will adopt next. His religious affinities and verbal atrocities are so free-ranging, we may find him flirting with Mormonism or discoursing on the joys of being a Rastafarian next week. But we can be pretty confident of one thing. It will not be the one true religion.
January 16, 2015
IT’S more of the same in sunny California.
Pagan Hollywood overwhelms children with material things and sentimental attention, giving them the appearance of being cherished, while denying them kinship and bonds with their true parents. It’s a brutal place to grow up, all the more so because of its glittering surfaces.
And it’s all perfectly legal in the U.S.A.
January 16, 2015
A GRATEFUL READER writes:
The latest issue of Touchstone magazine includes many excellent articles on the root problems of the Sexual Revolution. Anthony Esolen in his article “Mission Impossible” writes about how difficult it is to evangelize slaves to technology who know no tradition:
We are now among people who are better and worse than savages. They are, in most places, and for the time being, less likely to break the crockery, as Chesterton put it, than were the savages of old. They will cut babies to pieces in the womb, more than a million a year, but only rarely out of it; and they will be roused to the height of righteous wrath should they see someone leave a dog in a hot car in the summer. Read More »
January 15, 2015
THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes:
Concerning Duke’s embrace of the call-to-prayer, it occurs to me that a bunch of ugly people with their butts in the air and their faces buried in the ground is the image par excellence of modern higher education.
January 15, 2015
FROM Breitbart:
In a new initiative to promote religious pluralism, Duke University will broadcast the Muslim call to prayer every Friday on campus. The call to prayer—also known as “adhan”—will be chanted by the Duke Muslim Student Association.
The prayer itself is set to start this Friday at 1:00 p.m. and will be broadcast and amplified from the Chapel bell tower on campus.
January 15, 2015
FROM The International Business Times:
One of the biggest education publishers in the world has warned its authors not to mention pigs or sausages in their books to avoid causing offence.
Oxford University Press (OUP) said all books must take into consideration other cultures if they hope to sell copies in countries across the world.
As a result, the academic publisher has issued guidance advising writers to avoid mentioning pigs or “anything else which could be perceived as pork” so as not to offend Muslim or Jewish people.
January 15, 2015
Branson and the feminist Lady Sybil: Oh my!!
ACCORDING to Annetta Ramsay, writing for a feminist site, the soap opera “Downton Abbey” appeals to women primarily because the female characters are working to subvert the patriarchal system.
For female viewers, Downton’s pleasure is … that of a historical nightmare from which we can escape. The wardrobes and ease that some women enjoy presents an enviable fantasy but the overall class system depicted by the series imposes an oppressive system of patriarchy on every woman.
What a hoot.
“Downton Abbey” is a domestic spectacular. The hugely popular series lavishly celebrates domestic order and beauty, highly feminine dress, traditional sex roles (as we can see from the scene above in which the chauffeur Branson carries the swooning and not-all-that-liberated suffragette Lady Sybil away from a political rally) and the English nobility, all of which depended on the “patriarchal system.” Women viewers, many of whom live amid the domestic chaos and sterility which today’s nominally egalitarian elite has imposed on the lower orders, love these scenes of a house well run. Some view this as a guilty pleasure. Almost all bask in it. Look at the busy and efficient kitchen! Look at the lovely wallpaper! Look at the exquisite clothes of landed aristocrats and the starched servants’ dress, both so different from the unisex uniform of denim and T-shirts which factories churn out for the New Order proletariat! The servants are better dressed by any standards but those of purveyors of nihilistic ugliness than wealthy CEO’s in Silicon Valley. In short, look at the manners and civility of it all. This is a world in which even a paid servant would NOT eat dinner from grease-stained boxes of industrial grade pizza (though probably a handsome percentage of viewers are eating pizza while watching it all, such being the internal contradictions and demands of entertainment).
Such retro themes and domestic romanticism are interspersed with heavy doses of socialist and feminist rhetoric so that viewers from this very different world are not so overcome with guilt or nostalgia that they become radicalized in the wrong direction and so that the female viewers in particular, upon whom the success of the series depends, are the beneficiaries of ceaseless pandering. To pander to a woman today is to tell her she can have absolutely everything. She can be a feminist pitted against the past and its evil ways and a princess indulging in her ancestral civilization and the boons of male authority. Her emotional instincts are unfailingly right. It is not surprising that Ramsay approves of this pandering given the aggrieved narcissism of the publication for which she writes, which is calculated political pandering to the max and leads to true female oppression.
Ramsay has a few of her historical facts wrong. But that’s nothing new for feminists.
At that time, British women couldn’t own property, not all of them could vote and they had no rights if their husbands died. Like water penetrating cracks, even the upper-crust women of “Downton Abbey” seem eager to subtly dismantle the British class system holding them back.
Not all men could vote either. For most of British history voting rights were severely restricted for men. Most men couldn’t vote. Read More »
January 14, 2015
DANIËL O. writes:
First of all, my best wishes for the New Year, and I hope that your blog will last many more years.
Secondly, I have a question to you and your readers: Could it be that the logical and eventual conclusion following from feminist premises is conversion to Islam?
Recently, two young free-spirited women from Italy went to Syria to provide aid to refugees there, and ignored the pleas from their fathers and family not to go. Unsurprisingly, the women have been kidnapped by Islamic militants and appeared in a video wearing niqabs. Read More »
January 13, 2015
WHITE suburbanites react to the execution of a college student during a purse snatching with …. tears.
January 13, 2015
THE remaining writers and cartoonists of the crude and disgusting French magazine Charlie Hebdo have churned out their first issue since the massacre, and it proclaims their complete nihilism — and a subtle form of submission to Islam. The cover shows Muhammad with a sign that says “Je Suis Charlie.” Beneath it is text that says, “All is forgiven.” The idea is that it’s all just a joke. Nothing is serious — not even a massacre. They can even joke in the immediate aftermath of bloodshed in their own offices. They must protect the right to joke — and immediately forgive those who take them a tad too seriously.
But, wait, cartoonist Renald Luzier, says it is all serious too. The aim is to mock all religion. Luzier made this confusing and contradictory statement to the press:
‘We will not give in,’ he told a radio station. ‘The spirit of “Je suis Charlie” means the right to blaspheme.
‘We will not give in otherwise all this won’t have meant anything. A Je Suis Charlie banner means you have the right to criticise my religion, because it’s not serious.
‘We have never criticised a Jew because he’s a Jew, a Muslim because he’s a Muslim or a Christian because he’s a Christian.
‘But you can say anything you like, the worst horrors – and we do – about Christianity, Judaism and Islam, because behind the nice slogans, that’s the reality of Charlie Hebdo.’
Up to 3 million copies of Charlie Hebdo – whose usual circulation is 60,000 – will be printed on Wednesday.
January 13, 2015
HERE’S a quote that sums up the callousness and inhumanity of “third-party reproduction,” which involves surrogacy, egg donation and sperm donation:
“One of the most upsetting things for me about the way I was brought into the world is the blatant double standard involved. My mother’s need to have a genetic link to her child was valued, while my need to know, love and understand the father with whom I have a genetic link was not.”
January 12, 2015
FROM Novus Ordo Watch:
Now that a total of twelve people were killed — including two policemen — in Paris, France, at the editorial offices of the blasphemous and pornographic Charlie Hebdo cartoon newspaper, countless people across Europe are marching in favor of freedom of speech, holding signs that say “Je Suis Charlie” (“I am Charlie”), thus expressing their solidarity with the victims of the massacre and their determination to support and enforce people’s rights to believe and express in public whatever they please, regardless of how much it may offend another.
People held demonstrations and candlelight vigils not only in Paris, where a total of 2.5 million was estimated on Sunday, Jan. 11, but also in Amsterdam (Netherlands), Lisbon (Spain), Cludj (Romania), Stuttgart (Germany), Salzburg (Austria), and Prague (Czech Republic). That is not to say that all those people agreed with the truly disgusting (and often severely anti-Catholic) cartoons printed by the Charlie Hebdo rag, but rather that, even though they might disagree, they clearly support everyone’s right to free speech. That’s always the official reasoning. Read More »
January 12, 2015
IN the post about RAF Wing Commander Nikki Thomas, James P. writes:
She looks ridiculous. The narrow shoulders, the ill-fitting suit, the oversize medals (awarded for what?) that remind me of Leonid Brezhnev, the hat that makes her look like she should be handing out parking tickets. Much of it is “not her fault” in the sense that her physique is what it is, and she wears the uniform the military prescribes for her. Still, she chose to put herself where she is, and I have no doubt she would aggressively insist she has every right to be there, no matter what the cost to the RAF and the nation.
January 12, 2015
A QUOTE from Dr. Emanuel Tanya [Update: The alleged source of this quote is disputed here.]:
We are told again and again by ‘experts’ and ‘talking heads’ that Islam is the religion of peace and that the vast majority of Muslims just want to live in peace. Although this unqualified assertion may be true, it is entirely irrelevant. It is meaningless fluff, meant to make us feel better, and meant to somehow diminish the spectra of fanatics rampaging across the globe in the name of Islam.
The fact is that the fanatics rule Islam at this moment in history. It is the fanatics who wage any one of 50 shooting wars worldwide. It is the fanatics who systematically slaughter Christian or tribal groups throughout Africa and are gradually taking over the entire continent in an Islamic wave. It is the fanatics who bomb, behead, murder, or honor-kill. It is the fanatics who take over mosque after mosque. It is the fanatics who zealously spread the stoning and hanging of rape victims. It is the fanatics who teach their young to kill and to become suicide bombers. Read More »
January 12, 2015
TOM writes:
Regarding our situation, the writer Solange Hertz summed it all up in one of her books:
In its youth the sinful earth was renewed by the Flood, only to relapse into universal disorder. Eventually God became man in ordered to renew it by His Blood, generating a new society of grace on earth, and in due time the political miracle called Christendom literally materialized from the petition “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven,” which He commanded be addressed daily to our Father “Who are in Heaven.” Like Israel of old, however, it too began disintegrating. Read More »
